HandCash is a leading wallet provider for the Bitcoin SV ecosystem that is best known for its pioneering approaches to make Bitcoin as user friendly as possible. Other digital currency app developers have already been more than inspired by HandCashs design.
CoinGeeks Michael Wehrmann caught up with Alex Agut, Rafa Jimnez and Ivan Mlinari from HandCash to talk about Bitcoin app design, inter-wallet competition, Bitcoin computation and more.
Hello Alex, Rafa and Ivan! Kindly introduce our readers to what HandCash is and what role each of you fulfill in the HandCash team.
Alex Agut: Im one of the co-founders and CEO at HandCash, and my roles are mostly product design and dealing with the business side: raising money, marketing and paperwork.
Rafa Jimnez: Im the (other) co-founder and CTO at HandCash. Im responsible for the technological decisions to fulfill the vision of our company, provide the resources to our development team as well as create and implement our team culture. Also I do a bunch of coding, of course!
Ivan Mlinari: Im the senior software engineer. Joined almost a year ago. I am responsible for our cloud infrastructure and domain knowledge/logic.
HandCashs website slogan is Bitcoin for the rest of us. What does it mean?
Alex Agut: While others have been trying to please the cryptocurrency crowd for the last 10 years, we feel our place in this ecosystem is to make this technology more accessible and valuable for the rest of the world.
HandCash is best known for its astonishingly simple user interface. Some months ago, we have seen a well-known BCH wallet providerwith way more funding than you havemore or less copying your entire UI. Is there any way for HandCash to protect its UI against blatant copying?
Alex Agut: No. In fact, we think its a strong positive signal that companies all over the world are looking at our company for leadership in terms of usability, design and mindset. We keep innovating and we have things in development which are years ahead of anything out therenext time itll take a few years for others to catch upbut they will try. Youll see what I mean.
What does it tell us if a well-funded BCH wallet provider actually pays attention to your creations? Are you setting new standards for digital currency apps in general?
Rafa Jimnez: Innovation means providing new products that are accepted. It sort of validates the work our team is doing. We are actually working on the next iteration of digital currency. We have seen credit cards, then we had PayPal and the next generation is HandCash with Cloud Money to make money more connected and accessible. So new technology requires new standards.
Ivan Mlinari: We like to focus on a handful of things we see as important but not properly addressed in the world of digital currencies. If others later copy us that usually means we were right about it.
Alex, you have tweeted that copying a design is never the same as actually creating it, as there is more to design than just design decisions on the surface. Kindly elaborate on that.
Alex Agut: I believe that design is about how things work, not how they look. If you are blindly copying the placement of buttons and screens, without knowing the why behind those decisions, youll never understand the essence of your product. The UI is just the culmination of your intent, your purpose. Theres a process behind it.
How is HandCash actually making money? And how do you plan on making even more money?
Alex Agut: To be honest, our only source of income at the moment is our merchandising, thanks to an exclusivity agreement with Zeroconfs.com, but we will start monetizing in a more meaningful way very soon through Connect, some neat fiat ramp systems and other stuff. At the same time we realize monetizing or not at this stage wont move the needle one bit as this industry is barely starting and there are still a lot of innovations needed to get to a point where we can market this confidently to normal people.
HandCash and Money Button recently surprised Bitcoin SV users with a huge press release concerning the implementation of an inter-wallet peer-to-peer collaboration. Kindly introduce our readers to this implementation and the implications of that.
Rafa Jimnez: It was a great announcement! Using the Bitcoin network has become the standard way for the wallets and services to communicate to each other. This approach is highly expensive for services with many users that use their wallets frequently as we need to constantly monitor each transaction in the network to find out which one is relevant for our users.What we announced was a different communication channel based on Paymail, so the different wallet providers can communicate to each other directly (P2P) instead of using the Bitcoin network thoroughly. The Bitcoin network should be reserved just for the miners. This is just part of the original recipe of Bitcoin.Ivan Mlinari: IP2IP transactions are something that was part of original Satoshis bitcoin client. But after he left functionality was removed, because it was never fully implemented. Yesterday we were joking we are now fulfilling Theymos vision because there is an old thread on bitcointalk where core developers decided to remove it from the code base. And Theymos was the only one in favor to rather finish it. He was overruled. If you know his role later in the small block and everyone needs to run a full node debate it is a pretty fascinating read.
Our main motivation here is to go P2P as soon as possible as this is primarily a scalability solution. We cannot afford that one single enterprise adopts BSV and surprises us with lots of traffic on the BSV network. One big entity can literally kill the majority of the apps running now on Bitcoin when it generates lots of traffic. Recipe on how to solve the scalability issue was already set by Satoshi. We chose to extend paymail, because paymail already solved what was missing from Satoshis implementation and we actually just needed to add the part he did implement. Money Button did a fantastic job here for us, we are very thankful.
I find this collaboration interesting, because I thought HandCash and Money Button compete for the same users. Is Bitcoin incentivizing businesses to collaborate in new ways other than in the non-Bitcoin world?
Alex Agut: Personally, we dont consider Money Button our competition, so that makes things easy. We might be trying to reach the same audience right now, but as time passes and the audience gets bigger (the pie grows) the differences will be more noticeable. I even think they can be two great complimentary products and ecosystems, so well see.
Given our friendship, weve discussed many times about our shared need of moving away from non-P2P to a P2P kind of network, as it should (just read the title of the whitepaper). So both of our teams decided to join forces as we both had a very similar goal, and it would be a win-win for both of us. We have more to lose by not having P2P in Bitcoin when dealing with other services, and Money Button is by far our biggest bridge of transactions (outside of HandCash to HandCash) so it made so much sense to cover most of our transactions under P2P as soon as possible. This will be particularly critical when we launch Connect as part of the HandCash ecosystem.
Help us understand how wallet providers actually compete in the Bitcoin SV ecosystem. Is there an incentive for wallet providers to let users switch to other services easily, or is there an incentive to lock in users? Looking at Twitter, Google, Amazon etc., they are essentially all locking in users in a way, because otherwise their business models would not work. Users might not even want to have several wallet providers or switch services in general though, but have one that meets their demands perfectly well. What are your thoughts?
Alex Agut: There are many sides to that. While Bitcoin enthusiasts (or fans) cheer for interoperability of keys and freedom of movement, both from the business and development side things look a lot differently. Theres a big incentive to create and grow your network effect, and also there are immense advantages of having a custom wallet infrastructure thats not compatible with others: flexibility for new features, increased security, way less errors, drastically less support tickets so its not a matter of trying to lock down, we cant.
You can always send your Bitcoin away by using paymail, or cashing out to your bank. We cant and we wont hold anybody hostage. But does it make any sense to export your private key etc. to another wallet infrastructure and cause UTXO sync issues to both companies and make double spends easier to pull off, when you can just move your money away and get a csv with all your transactions from that service? We think thats just the old, geeky way of doing things, but doesnt necessarily create the best products. We are not dogmatic about Bitcoin, we are just using it as a tool to create great products that people love and find valuable.
Rafa Jimnez: We agree with Ryan X. Charles and other entrepreneurs in the space on making the pie bigger instead of trying to monopolize the ecosystem. The possibilities right now are endless, so competing for the same thing would even be a joke.
I have a strong opinion on interoperability. Despite being a desirable feature, its very expensive: many different companies have to agree on the same way to operate. It hinders innovation as you cant change the way to operate even if you find more efficient or more sophisticated ways.
We need to be smart about managing the interoperability/innovation barrier, especially in the growing period we are now! This is why our collaboration with Money Button has a lot of value.Ivan Mlinari: The big advantage for a Bitcoin powered wallet is it that company building it can save a lot of operational costs and enjoys the reduced barrier to entry because a startup does not need to build a very expensive closed custom ledger and then spend lots of money on securing it (internally and externally). This part is mostly solved from day one and companies can enjoy competitive advantage over those which are not in this position. But Bitcoin is inherently a public ledger, so the moment you touch it you are entering the interoperable world. Users can always send money to different wallets.But there are also other economic incentives. We cooperate with other wallets and POS providers because talking directly to each other is the only way we can efficiently scale while using sufficient privacy and utilize advanced features Bitcoin provides.
Is it wrong to say your inter-wallet P2P implementation helps Bitcoin SV to scale, or at least helps the Bitcoin SV apps to scale?
Rafa Jimnez: Thats right. The P2P network between users and services is not relevant for the miners at all. So this is a measure to help applications to scale, or in other words to scale the application layer.
Ivan Mlinari: Its not wrong at all. Its exactly that.
As far as I understand, this P2P implementation is between services, not necessarily between customers and merchants. Is that correct?
Rafa Jimnez: Great question. This implementation provides some kind of transaction notifications between services. At the time one service notified other services about a transaction, such a transaction was already sent to the miners.In the customer-merchant context, at the time the transaction is sent from the customer to the merchant it has not been seen by the miners yet, because they need to make sure they agree on certain criteria for the transaction like the exact amount to pay or the fees.The context for the implementation we provided doesnt need to enforce these rules. Its just people sending tips to each other or people transferring their funds between different services.
Ivan Mlinari: Yes, this is just a simple push transaction protocol between services/wallets/users. Main use case we had in mind when we designed it was microtransactions. But that doesnt mean it does not work well for larger transactions, too. It is very similar to BIP270 which covers merchant payments, but is not that. Its a separate simplified protocol.
Is HandCash working for B2C transactions to be more SPV in the future, too?
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HandCash make Bitcoin more accessible 'for the rest of us' - CoinGeek
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